MSI started a new line of high-end motherboards and graphics cards last year, featuring an attractive appearance and high-quality components. “Big Bang” motherboards and “Lightning” series of graphics cards contain shielded capacitors, coils and other components certified for military use, which means a far higher life expectancy, a wider temperature operation range etc., whereas the graphics cards from this series always had a redesigned and optimized PCB with large and very efficient cooling systems. While all “Lightning” graphics cards have carried Nvidia chips, MSI launched a new “Hawk” series, containing AMD’s “Evergreen” GPU.

As we already know, Radeons HD 5770 have a GPU clocked at 850 MHz and memory at 1200 MHz. Since GDDR5 chips are implemented, which can transfer four bits of information per clock, this gives an effective clock of 4800 MHz. The memory bus is 128 bits wide, but owing to the GDDR5 memory and its quadruple throughput, the yielded performance is similar to that of GDDR3 memory coupled with a 256-bit bus. HD 5770 also has 800 stream processors, 40 texture and 16 ROP units, while all samples require additional power via the PCI-E 6-pin power connector, although the peak power consumption isn’t exceeding the PCI-E x16 slot power output for more than 30 watts, so the HD 5770s don’t really belong to the high consumption category.